Employment Listings are Another Forfeited Franchise

by Bob Wyman

Until literally a few months ago, the newspaper industry held a
virtual monopoly over the public posting of open jobs. Today, the
industry finds that it is only one of many players who
use the Internet as a means of posting and gathering
employment-related information.

Oddly, while most of the companies that have entered the business
in the last few months are either generating or seeking to generate
revenues from their efforts, few newspapers have even attempted to use
online postings as anything other than a "freebie" which is included in
the base price of their paper-based listings.

Andreesen
claims there will be a
mad scramble among the regional
bells to provide high bandwidth
services.

The help wanted market is only one of many examples of franchises
that were once held by the newspaper industry that are currently being
cherry-picked and plundered by a vast number of new businesses. Bit by
bit, the industry is unnecessarily losing its grip on its traditional
roles and its revenue sources. The phone and directory services
companies are working hard to build services that will eclipse the weak
efforts of newspaper publishers to exploit their classified ads online.
A whole host of new companies are
taking strong positions in the job postings business. Almost everyone,
including software companies like Adobe and Microsoft, seems to have
gotten in the business of distributing national and international news
and out-of-the-industry competition in the local news space is starting
to grow.

This loss of franchise is not the result of pitched battles between
the traditional holders, the newspapers, and the new upstarts. Rather,
it's all happening very peacefully as the newspapers simply watch and
study events from the sidelines. The upstarts aren't "winning" market
positions that someone else held online, rather, they are simply
filling in a void that the newspapers as an industry have seemingly
refused to value. Of course, once the papers finally realize they must
fight back, they will be fighting against entrenched competitors and
things will get messy. It would have been much simpler if the papers
had taken the initiative and filled the market/service holes before the
new competition had had a chance to grow.

I've been spending a good bit of time recently looking at online
job resources since I'm looking for work for myself. Being willing to
relocate, my first assumption was that I would simply call up the
online papers from the cities that interested me and use them as my
primary resource. What I found was a mess. Most papers seem to have
done nothing more with their job postings other than simply dump them
online. Some have implemented fairly weak search systems, but none
really provides much value. What I have ended up doing is relying on
non-newspaper services.

I think the root of the problem with the newspapers is that too
many of them are worrying about the problem of putting their paper
online while most of their new competitors are viewing the opportunity
as one of building compelling information services that will make
money. The result is a glut of newspaper sponsored sites on the Net
that are intent on offering news while the competition is intent on
making money... This difference is seen in a variety of ways, but one
of the most telling is the difference in the source of online content
in the help wanted area.

Virtually every "jobs site" on the web provides a mechanism to
allow you to post new ads online for a fee. Most of these ads will
never be printed on paper. However, the newspaper sites only publish
online ads which have run in their paper versions and I have yet to see
a paper that charges for the service. What is being missed here is that
the online arena offers opportunities for building new business, not
simply a place to dump content from the paper version.

If you look at the corporate sites in your area, you'll notice that
many companies have a "jobs" section off their home page. In that
section you'll usually see lists of open jobs that aren't printed in
any newspaper. What you'll frequently find in the newspaper is a
cryptic (and short) ad making a general statement that the company is
hiring. More and more frequently, the printed ad will contain a pointer
to the URL for the company's jobs page... This makes sense from the
advertiser's point of view but is not good for the papers. The
advertisers are forced to limit the size of their printed ads because
of their cost. They have no alternative other than their own sites, or
sites like MonsterBoard, as a place to publish more detailed online
listings.

The real cost to newspapers here isn't the lost revenue from the
online ads that aren't published in the paper. Rather, the real cost
arises from the fact that the market is becoming accustomed to seeing
and looking for job listings in non-newspaper forums. The real cost is
the loss of the franchise.

Just as I recently argued that papers should be seeking to carry
online advertisements and directory entries that don't appear in their
papers, I also argue that the papers should look at the online help
wanted business as something more than a place to dump their paper
based ads. You should do a survey of every local corporate site and
every local recruiting firm's site and if there are jobs posted on any
of them that aren't in your online system, you should review the SCP
(salary continuation plan...) of the folk running your online version.
You should be ensuring that your paper is offering the premier site
for job postings in your area and that you--not the startups in the
garages outside town--are the ones making money from online job
postings.

If the newspapers are to remain viable, they will have to find ways
to maintain at least their existing roles and franchises. Without
revenue sources, the ability of the papers to publish content, online
or not, will be diminished. Please people... I really don't want to get
my news from the phone company...